Windows XP to Windows 7 Migration Self-Study Guide

I had not initially planned on this being my next self-study guide, but a request from my someone on my team recently has led me to this topic. With so much work going on for customers to get off Windows XP due to the coming "end of support" date for it (on 4/8/2014 per the Microsoft Product Support Lifecycle), it made sense to me to put out a quick self-study guide on the guidance from Microsoft related to this topic. This may not be of interest to everyone who is looking for guides related to our newest products, but given its critical nature I hope it can provide some needed guidance for those customers who are beginning to think about how to upgrade their client infrastructures.

For those of you wondering why I am not including Windows 8 in this guide, I have not done so because as of this writing our newest client operating system has not yet been released. In fact, the available guidance around an XP to Windows 8 upgrade is virtually nonexistent as of this writing, as this article from Computerworld magazine describes. Because of these reasons, I've decided to focus exclusively in this post on the XP to Windows 7 that so many customers are currently focused on. Hopefully it's useful for you.